For the publisher of a book that is both derided as racist drivel and lauded as deeply influential among Trump administration immigration restrictionists, there’s nothing more valuable than being able to claim you’ve been cancelled.
In this case, far-right activists are alleging censorship after Amazon briefly delisted a paperback version of the Camp of the Saints. It’s an influential anti-immigration tome; the edition whose paperback version disappeared from Amazon had an introduction penned by a fellow at a think tank that helped devise Project 2025. The reason for and extent of that delisting remains unclear.
It doesn’t matter how brief that cancellation may have been. Nor do the specifics of how, why, or whether there even was a full cancellation. What matters is that claiming to be censored is a great way to market books.
“The printers are going to be very busy meeting all of this new demand. In that respect, Amazon has done us a great favor,” Ethan Rundell, co-founder of publisher Vauban Books, told TPM. “We couldn’t have asked for better.”
Rundell recently translated and published the new edition. The French novel envisions a world in which one million migrants set off on rafts from India before arriving in Europe, overwhelming the locals and creating a dystopia. The migrants, described as devouring human feces and promiscuous, later take control of the French government, using the Air Force to destroy a last redoubt — or “camp” — of people of different races committed to preserving what the book describes as Western civilization.
The Camp of the Saints would likely remain part of the arcana of the European far-right were it not for Trump and the MAGA movement. Two of MAGA’s most nativist Steves — Miller and Bannon — reportedly admire the book, along with others. The book casts the migrants in eerily familiar terms: they’re “invaders.” Viktor Orbán described the book in 2022 as anticipating the “Great Replacement,” a far-right conspiracy theory which accuses elites of plotting to restock their nations with non-white people.
The new U.S. edition was published last year. Vauban held a launch party in D.C. in December at Butterworth’s, the capital’s gathering place of young national conservatives and MAGA elites.
On Monday, Rundell told TPM, he noticed that Amazon was no longer selling a paperback version. Soon, he said, he saw that it had stopped offering a hardcover version, too. Rundell told TPM that he heard from his distributor that Amazon had pulled the listings after finding that the book was in violation of the company’s “offensive content policy.”
When TPM contacted Amazon about this, the company blamed the issue on a technical error that “briefly affected the availability of a paperback listing of The Camp of the Saints, and the title is now restored.” By Monday evening, the listings were available again.
Amazon wields immense market power. It controls 50 percent of print book sales, more than 80 percent of e-book sales, and 90 percent of online print book sales, per a 2020 House Judiciary Committee report.
Vauban immediately cast the brief delisting as a fundamental free speech issue. It was “suppression,” Rundell said. Amazon was trying to “censor and restrict conservative speech,” he argued.
“There was clearly a campaign underway within Amazon to suppress the Camp of the Saints, our edition, and to make it very difficult to get any information about our publishing venture,” Rundell told TPM.
The publisher also began to notify administration officials who have previously used their offices to respond to social media controversies. Vauban tagged FCC Chair Brendan Carr and Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon. The Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by current OMB chief Russ Vought, said that a fellow who wrote an introduction to the book was being “CENSORED.” Jeremy Carl, whose writings on “white erasure” lost him Senate support for a State Department nomination, suggested that the DOJ Antitrust Division should take a look. Influential far-right activist Jack Posobiec took up the cause.
The ebook version remained available on Amazon without interruption. Other translations of the book never disappeared from the website.
Vauban is an imprint of a publisher that Rundell also co-founded called Redoubt Press. He told TPM that the company chose the name because they envision themselves as in a “defensive posture” against an “established publishing world” innately skeptical of white, conservative authors. It also goes to the end of The Camp of the Saints: “our heroes die defending their idea of Western civilization in the French state in a mountain redoubt.”
Rundell denied to TPM that the book is racist, saying that the novel includes non-white characters who defend Western civilization against South Asian migrants.
“When they say the book is racist, they say it’s racist because it involves an unflattering collective portrait of a group of non-Western people, the migrants. And that’s true, it does,” he said. “And yet what’s remarkable to me is that, once again, this is a fiction we’re talking about. From a historical point of view, has it ever been the case that a million uninvited foreigners from a distant civilization suddenly appear on your shores?”
As of this writing, the book had shot up to number 63 in all best sellers on Amazon, and was listed as number 1 in Immigration Studies and French Literature.
In reading the complaints over supposed suppression by Amazon, it’s hard not to hear some nostalgia. After all, complaints of censorship, platforms excluding certain views, and stifled debate played a large role in allowing the kind of extreme nativism that now dominates American politics to break into the mainstream.
It remains unclear whether Amazon identified a version of the book as too racist for its platform, or whether it was, as the company contends, a simple technical glitch.
For Rundell, the attention that the incident generated is what matters.
“For that, we’re grateful,” he said.
Who in MAGA-world has the brain power and the attention span to read an entire book? I’m pretty sure that about 120 characters pushes the limit of their abilities.